Italian

One of the great centers of film production since cinema's earliest days, Italy has always juggled artistic prestige and the ever-shifting genre demands of the marketplace. Over the decades, Italy has exported trends in historical spectacle, neo-realism, sexploitation and violent shock value while also giving us the unalloyed genius of Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci and many more (including Mario Bava and a handful other remarkable Italian filmmakers that rarely get mentioned in the same company as the above but are certainly every bit as worthy).